The dissatisfaction with the slow improvement of living standards was no doubt amplified by the increasing ease with which Soviet citizens could make invidious comparisons with the West. As détente, travel, and communication brought greater awareness of how citizens lived in the West, the gap in living standards challenged the claims that socialism was leading to a better life. Fred Halliday said, “Once the living standards gap became evident then the residual legitimacy of the communist political system was swept away and that of the alternative system, the Western variant of pluralism, was enhanced.”229 Public opinion polls contradicted Halliday’s exaggerated claims, yet Halliday may well have captured the fears of Soviet leaders over where a growing gap in living standards might lead.
If economic problems provided the major backdrop of perestroika, political problems ran close behind. The problems within the Party itself had deep roots. World War II had denuded the Party of millions of dedicated cadre who had died at the front defending socialism and the homeland. Khrushchev further weakened the Party by opening wide its doors to millions of non-workers and lowering Party standards. Leonid Brezhnev’s “stability of cadre” doctrine turned Party positions into sinecures, kept Party leaders in office long past their prime, and deprived the Party of fresh blood and ideas. Moreover, as the second economy grew, it increasingly enmeshed and corrupted elements of the Party. Under Brezhnev, corruption—according to one historian—“flourished to a fabulous extent,” reaching even Brezhnev’s own family.230 In many places, nepotism, patronage, protectionism, and sycophancy prevailed. Party meetings became top-down, routine, and formal. Ideology became formulaic, and more and more intellectuals and even Party members refused to take it seriously.
Nothing symbolized the political and ideological ossification more than the senescence, illness, and death in office of the three leaders that preceded Gorbachev. The Politburo’s elevation of Gorbachev, its youngest member, to the post of General Secretary reflected a widespread concern over the perceived decrepitude of the Party leaders. Gorbachev was well aware of this. He later noted that “people were sick” of having a Politburo whose average age was around seventy and many of whose members had held their posts for twenty or thirty years and were too ill to function.231
A third problem in the backdrop of reform had to do foreign relations. Though the Soviet Union had never been free of imperialist pressure, this pressure increased under President Jimmy Carter and increased even more under President Ronald Reagan. Between 1981 and 1986, the Reagan administration launched a “full court press”232 against the “evil empire” designed to shrink its foreign influence and damage its economy. This campaign involved support for the Solidarity movement in Poland and the counterrevolutionary guerillas in Afghanistan, an effort to diminish Soviet gold reserves by driving down the price of oil, an increased propaganda offensive, diplomatic moves to reduce Soviet access to Western technology, the disruption of the Soviet economy by exporting faulty equipment, and an effort to bankrupt the Soviets by initiating a military build-up spearheaded by the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars.233
A few details suggest the scope and results of this campaign. The United States was giving $8 million a year to the Polish opposition group, Solidarity, and supplying it with sophisticated communication equipment, computers, fax machines, printing equipment, and intelligence information. U.S. sanctions against Poland required the Soviet Union to send the country $1 to $2 billion a year in aid. Led by the efforts of CIA chief William Casey, the administration trained Afghans, sent them artillery and rockets, and induced the Egyptians, Saudis, and Chinese to send them aid. The Soviet military effort to protect the Afghan revolutionary government against the American-supported war lords cost the Soviets $3 to $4 billion a year.234
The American government worked systematically with the Saudis and OPEC to lower the price of oil on the world market, a move that aided the American economy while devastating the Soviets, who depended on oil sales for the bulk of their hard currency. The Reagan administration agreed to sell advanced military planes and Stinger missiles to the Saudis in return for greater oil production and lower prices. In 1983, under U.S. pressure, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cut the price of oil from $34 to $29 a barrel. In 1985, the Saudis increased their oil production from less than 2 million barrels a day to 9 million barrels. Within five months, the price of oil fell to $12 a barrel. As writer Peter Schweizer noted, “For Moscow, over $10 billion in valuable hard currency evaporated overnight, almost half its earnings.”235
The Reagan administration also engaged in technological warfare. Beginning in December 1981, Reagan instituted an embargo of American gas and oil equipment to the Soviet Union. In June 1982, he extended the sanctions to American licensees and subsidiaries abroad. In November 1982, Reagan signed the National Security Decision Directive NSDD-66, whose principal author described it as “a secret declaration of economic war on the Soviet Union.” Among its goals was to deny high technology to the Soviet Union and reduce European imports of Soviet gas and oil. By 1983, American high-tech exports to the Soviet Union were valued at only $39 million compared to $219 million in 1975. This economic warfare did not stop with denying the Soviets access to high-tech; the U.S. also sabotaged the goods the Soviets did receive. In 1984, for example, the U.S. supplied the Soviet Union with faulty blueprints for gas turbine components and through middlemen sold the Soviet Union defective computer chips. Such moves cost the Soviet Union untold time and money.236
Part of Reagan’s destabilization effort involved an escalation of the ideological warfare waged by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Between 1982 and 1986, both stations increased the number and sophistication of their foreign-language broadcasts, as well as the number of their listeners. As glasnost reduced and then eliminated jamming in 1988, Radio Liberty reached 22 million Soviet listeners a month. Both stations fomented nationalism, stirred up outrage over the Chernobyl disaster, encouraged opposition to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, provided a platform for pro-market advocates like Yeltsin, and aired unsubstantiated corruption charges against the Party leader, Yegor Ligachev, after he opposed Gorbachev.237
The most serious part of the U.S. strategy called for increasing the military pressure on the Soviet Union, a strategy that some American analysts called “spending them into bankruptcy.”238 In his first news conference as president, Reagan declared the Soviet Union would “commit any crime,” would lie and cheat to achieve its goal of world domination. Shortly thereafter, Reagan began “the largest peace-time military buildup in American history.” This meant a military expenditure of $1.5 trillion in five years and plans to develop a Stealth bomber, to build hundreds of MX missiles, Multiple Independently-Targeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVed missiles), cruise missiles, and new B-1 bombers, and Trident submarines. The keystone of this ratcheting up of military pressure would be a fabulously expensive and futuristic missile defense system. On March 23, 1983, in a speech on national defense, President Reagan announced that he had decided to embark on the research and development to build such a system. Two years later, Reagan asked Congress for $26 billion to launch the Strategic Defensive Initiative.239